“Are you giving us a number?” one of my travelling companions, an elderly woman, asked me on our way to a local rehabilitation center for center for handicapped people.  I was singing quietly by myself my favorite,  “When I saw the cleansing fountain, open wide for all my sin”

We went along in a car designed for people like us, and the drivers are usually a mixture  coming from the far East.  Later  I was on the front seat with the driver of Iraqi descent but he considered himself an out-and-out Dane as he grew up in this country, but still speaking Arabic fluently.

“I´m a Christian”, he said which to many immigrants doesn´t always mean a great deal.  I witnessed to him about the new life in Christ and how His Spirit in us enables us to understand what we didn´t use to understand.  I felt he was real, and he said, “ You know, I´m now 36, and this is the first time a man has ever talked to me like you do.”  That humbled me.

Think of that.  Having lived always here in this “Christian” country, he has never met a witnessing Christian (so I took it).  The Christian witness has been paralyzed in worldliness and in a backslidden “Lutheran” church authorized by the state and to which more than 70% belong as formal members.  I now had something to talk with the Lord about.

My life is not completely without encouragements though.  I just I got an uplifting mail from one of my spiritual children now living in Norway.  The Lord let me lead him to Christ 50 years ago in our very young days right here in Denmark.  Now that dear man tells me how he gathers a group of people for bible fellowship which numbers various immigrants too. 

  Oh, “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth!”  It moves my heart to think of a future day where I may say also, “ Here I am, and the children God has given me!”  (Hebr. 2:13)

I long for an enlargement of that crowd! 

July 18, 2021 - jn